


Nesting Instinct

by herbailiwick



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Childhood, Dinosaurs, Gen, Neglect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-13
Updated: 2012-07-13
Packaged: 2017-11-09 21:15:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herbailiwick/pseuds/herbailiwick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anderson has quite a few fossils and books on dinosaurs. Sherlock noticed it, but only Anderson really knows why. </p><p>(It's not sexual.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nesting Instinct

Anderson's childhood is mostly a blur. Shouts rose up like storms back then, building and crashing and never quite feeling natural; the pressure in the air was always off. Scrapes and bruises were his responsibility to tend to—his own and Amelia's. He'd done a fair job of keeping her in good health, filling in for a mother whose love couldn't stay the clutches of depression as often as they all would have liked.

The animal food chain. More specifically, the dinosaur food chain. Depression was a scavenger, always waiting for his mum to fall. She does okay for herself now, but back then...back then was a different story. Any moment excitement bubbled up then burst, then sank back down away into the bubbling tar pit. The scavenger came and laid waste to his mother. God bless her, she kept coming back to life, to be picked clean again and again. In many ways, she's still a pile of bones to him, but he mourns those bones and cleans them with the care of a dental pick, and he categorizes them, and she's precious.

Father traveled. He was more of a pterodactyl or the like. He could go anywhere he wanted, yet he always came back to the nest. Anderson still doesn't know how to fly, how to get away like father. He'd tried, when he was just out of school, but he'd discovered that beyond the mountains lay fields with no vegetation. You can't build a life where there's nothing keeping you, and nothing was keeping Anderson. Something must have kept father, because he eventually decided it was nicer not to stay. Anderson hadn't been able to fly, but he hadn't been an egg anymore either.

Anderson remembers movies about dinosaurs. He remembers books checked out from the library, the way he'd begged for just a little more time with their promising secrets, remembers the gentle pity in the librarian's eyes. She could never resist a child. When he had turned into an awkward teenager, though, his puppy dog look didn't work anymore. That had stung more than he could really say. His mum didn't have the money to waste on dinosaurs, and he was very aware. He quit asking. He asked for socks and jumpers instead. He became practical.

Paleontology bled into archaeology, which bled into anthropology and forensic science. Anderson has his own dinosaur books now, books for all ages, though the wife doesn't want any kids. And Anderson wants kids, even though the things that aren't a blur from childhood include mummy alternately watching the telly with eyes that didn't register the programmes and telling him the most fantastic stories that he's all but forgotten now, all except the sound of her voice, which he still loves, despite the fact that she never tells tales anymore. 

He wants kids even though the things that aren't blurry include anxious moments spent trying to care for a sister who was, honestly, a bit of a terror, and even though he has a daddy who passed almost nothing on in what Amelia and he refer to as The Empty Anderson Legacy, which is something they never say in front of Mummy who is still bones and still has too much on her plate to hear such a name.

Anderson still wants kids, yeah. He remembers the importance of learning, and of imagination. He remembers standing in awe at the foot of the real-deal bones of a brontosaurus and thinking he could be like that, someday. He could hold his head up high, could get above it. He could see.

Sherlock has teased him that he must have a sexual attraction to dinosaurs, after a single look at his flat. Sherlock couldn't be more wrong. There is nothing more innocent than Anderson's affinity for dinosaurs. Somewhere, among the fossils and the glossy pages of speculative illustrations, a childhood has been kept for Anderson, pristine like he'd kept all the library books, but also just a little bit blurry.

His wife is a pterodactyl, but she wishes he wasn't in her nest. He's not got the will to fly, so he just sits there, her mate, wishing he had some eggs, wishing his nest wasn't as empty as The Anderson Legacy. The dinosaur books will go to some random relative when he dies, if he isn't careful. The fossils will too. 

He cheats on her, steps outside the nest when she's gone, brings others into it when she's not using it, not missing it. 

He's not a brontosaurus yet. He may never be a brontosaurus. But he's tired of being a pterodactyl with a broken wing and no eggs to look after, no young to teach to fly. He may not be able to make it out there, alone, without someone grounding him every once in a while, without vegetation to cling to. But his children could.

His wife tries to go to the museum with him. He let her at first, when it seemed promising. Now, that's just for him. She can find vegetation in her travels. She can adapt. 

One day, he's going to find himself devoid of life, devoid of legacy, living out the life his parents had handed to him when he'd wanted more. One day, Anderson is going to be extinct. Sherlock can poke fun all he wants. It could never be more pathetic to Sherlock than it is to Anderson.


End file.
